It was the hands that did it.
August 14, 2008
17.5 week bump
I’ll have travelled eighteen weeks down the baby-making trail on Saturday. Blimey. I’m almost halfway there already! I can’t believe how quickly it’s gone – well, actually I can, since I didn’t even know I was pregnant until I was 12 weeks. That might sound daft, but not as daft as my mum. She didn’t know I was on the way till she was five months gone. ‘I was just having too good a time,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even think about it. And I wasn’t fat at all…’
I found myself pregnant in entirely different circumstances. Let’s call the male half of this equation.. oh, I don’t know. How about Spider? Appropriate, in a way. I met Spider and thought he was nice, got on well, but not much more. He seemed very keen on me, and kept contacting me. In my stupid girl brain, this set off some kind of faulty chain reaction. The false logic goes something like this: ‘He is pursuing me. Ergo, he must like me. Ergo, I am flattered and feel wanted and special. Ergo, OMG this could be THE ONE!!!!!’ Needless to say, within two weeks of me succumbing to his charms (if you asked me what they were I couldn’t tell you) he had cooled off considerably and finally declared that he had got back together with his ex. Not the one, then. Not even close.
It wasn’t for another miserable and confusing eight weeks that I found out I was pregnant.
I have no doubt in my mind that I’ve made the right decision. I’m carrying a child. A beautiful, living being. I saw my child move, I saw the tiny moving hands, the perfect, even tinier fingers. I heard the astonishingly loud, vital, energized heartbeat of my baby and I knew then that there was never any other choice. I think it was the hands that did it, in the end. I asked Spider what he wanted, and he said he never wanted children. Ever. Never-never. I heard him, I heard the words… ‘but I DO,’ I said, and I looked at him, and I could see in his eyes that he knew it made no difference what he said. He took himself out of the equation, so I made the decision myself, to keep the baby.
